


Far Blacker Stars

by Aya_A_Anderson



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Akashi The Collector, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst, Bounty hunter!Aomine, Continuation, Fluff, M/M, Sexual Assault, Sexual Content, Sylph!Kuroko, mimic!Kise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-26
Updated: 2015-07-26
Packaged: 2018-04-11 07:26:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4426565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aya_A_Anderson/pseuds/Aya_A_Anderson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[Sequel to SkinandBones' Heavenly Blue.]</p><p>Forever is longer and darker than Kuroko ever knew. Captured and sold into slavery, he wonders if his love for Aomine - and Aomine's devotion to him - does them both more harm than good, when Aomine will go to any lengths to set him free.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Far Blacker Stars

**Author's Note:**

  * For [skinandbones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/skinandbones/gifts).



> Hello! 
> 
> Plot adoption from SkinandBones - here's the awaited sequel to Heavenly Blue, over yonder http://archiveofourown.org/works/2225523/chapters/4882158! 
> 
> This is a scifi, taking off from ~Chapter 18 of the first book. Beware of angst and undying aokuro romance.

In a standard year, three-hundred-sixty-five days around the first sun, the same earth that bore humankind was evacuated. Akashi Seijuurou had never seen it. He was born lightyears from it, while his father and grandparents took helm of operations. Aeries-61 was a nobility world, and its singular moon was Titan-2, 'Titan,' far from Titan-1 and far more vast. As a child, Seijuurou spent his birthdays in transit, the nights in Titan’s uppermost imperial tower, spiralling and fractured glass gone high above the Principle. Starkly in view, molten lakes and backlit factories built to harvest hydrocarbons, power seeping across and under rock and concrete and lighting the system's New Year. The brilliant city spun for miles outwards, out into moonscape and ancient glaciers.

Already, humans were colonising, multiplying, discovering, falling in the glaciers and volcanoes of other worlds, exploring fresh ranges that would surely take an eternity to map. Earth had been mapped across billions of years – this new effort had, for Seijuurou’s humanity, just begun.

At year’s end, night had fallen on the moon. Seijuurou, all of twelve, sat with another young boy of his own age whose name he couldn’t place. If he had arrived earlier, he would have met Hanamiya Makoto – he’d taken ill, been unable to attend the party, and Seijuurou remembers having been awash with jealousy. If he himself had faked sickness, he might have stayed home with his books from earth and continued to study Japanese to fluency, then ascended alone to the observatory to stargaze in a fresh year. Even then, his observatory was alight with bugs and strange, small creatures returned from off-planet. Creatures were the only item he’d ever stoop so low as to steal. More commonly, they had been bought, and sat in their suitable jars or cages.

Titan was a deadworld, freshly inhabited. With no interesting creatures of its own to lure Seijuurou, the whole experience was a diplomatic bore as his parents made nice with the Makotos. They were a scientifically-inclined lot, in charge of Titan’s energy operations, and their business was rapidly spreading to the mainlands of Aeries-61 and Calisto-9. Seijuurou had shaken hands with the mother and father – bright, kind people, risen from nothing – and found them despairingly boring.

Much was boring to Seijuurou. His studies were simple, the people he surrounded himself with were straightforward. The concept of space travel appealed, but he was too young to be allowed off-planet without an escort. No single job of the impossibly wide array he had heard of, been steered towards by well-meaning adults, was worthy of his notice.

And on the moon of Titan, at age twelve, Seijuurou looked away from the bland face of his company and noticed at once the tank set into the tower’s far wall. There seemed to be water within it, but no sort of drinking water. It was far too clear and blue. The layered rocks on the tank’s base were impossibly sharp. He noticed these things, and then grew attentive of the figure inhabiting the tank, of its beautiful tails, the feathered spines fringing its neck, its cold, inhuman face, the staples punched through its fins and chains, weighted and trailing to the floor.

He stood up immediately, ignoring the boy’s sharp words, and made his way through the throng of suited people, over to the tank. He stared closely at it, pressing his hands to the glass. It felt warm, fragile under his fingers.

The drone of voices faded around his ears, dropping away like static. The world escaped his notice. The creature, inhuman, flicked its tail and seemed to look at him. Seijuurou was never certain; the creature had no eyes, rather smooth rippled scales and a form of nose, contracting and dilating, breathing in the strange water.

Seijuurou’s eyes narrowed, delighted, and he moved closer.

The creature spooked. Its tails lashed at him, whipcord, a hissing noise surfacing, and then there was true silence through the room. Shocked, discordant, the creature wailed and Seijuurou pressed his face to the glass with an excited thrill –

It panicked, lashed, and the glass shattered over him.

~*~

The glass was impenetrable, they said. They wrung their hands and argued and Seijuurou, blinded by water and pain, had watched as the creature died beside him. Moaning, angry and bitter, he had been mistaken for agonized again and again, but Seijuurou mourned for the loss of a treasured, prized alien.

It had been the last of its species, he later discovered. The last of its species, and nothing to the Makotos, who were immensely more preoccupied with the treatment of Seijuurou, the regrowth and grafting of his skin, the repair of his eyes; his eyes would not have been damaged at all if he had shut them sooner, and Seijuurou’s mother wept at his side as he lay prone and blind and asked him why he had not closed them, and Seijuurou hardened and shuttered himself at the creature’s death and how he’d caused it, in the lack of human care for it, of human waste never learned from the waste of earth.

He could be misguided. He considered this later, then the Collector, the beauty he stored and kept. His desire to protect was quite humanly selfish, for the Collector protected only things that were valuable, only the things he owned.

(Aomine Daiki was a fool.)


End file.
